We are not human
Name
parfit-singer.pdf
Size
48.57 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
da453ba9cb0fdcb32ea494a8074238e0
Date Issued
May 2017
Journal
Times Literary Supplement
Publisher
News UK
Citation
Setiya, Kieran. "We are not human." Times Literary Supplement, May 24, 2017, News UK, 2017.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
A questionable perk of life as a professional philosopher is being the occasional recipient of unsolicited monographs by self-published amateurs. Affectionately known as “crazy books”, these volumes crash the mailroom of a Philosophy Department, bearing titles like Ethics of the Astral Plane or The Key to All Ontologies. They promise answers to the deepest, oldest questions: the meaning of life, the universe and everything, unearthed without the help of experts or academic training. Once, when I made light of a recent arrival, a colleague stopped me short. He always felt bad, he said, that we did not have time to read these books. What if somewhere within them were the insights of an untutored genius, lost forever through the impatient cynicism of people like us?
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/private/parfit-we-are-not-human/
